Approximately 800 miles of electrical conduit in 10-foot sections have been laboriously painted, first with smelly, toxic weird purple stuff and then with glue at the ends, jammed together until the glue set and dropped into the three-foot-deep trench, all while carefully running a 400-foot long string through them and keeping it untangled and Not letting it get glued into the joints. Much. We did have to cut off one pipe section and redo it, but what's one out of 40-odd?

Also, while not falling into said trench, or purpling or gluing ourselves, or any of the other possible mishaps that could have occurred. Except for that one unfortunate time I dropped the pipe the several feet down into the trench and the curved fiberglass elbow at the other end of it slammed very painfully into DH's ribs.

Oopsie.

Sorry about that. I thought he Said we were supposed to drop the pipe into the trench. Apparently not. He did say some other words, though, after I dropped it...

At any rate, we also glued the bendy elbows onto the ends of the conduit, and ran another 50-foot line of larger conduit from the transformer site to the house, and tied the official pull string required by the power company onto the original string and pulled it through, and covered the conduit with soil, and DH is now building a gravel pad for the transformer to sit on.

All of which left us as out of breath as you are after reading that last sentence.

At one point, as we sat on the edge of the trench panting for breath and contemplating our various aches, DH said, “Isn't this fun? I told you building a house would be fun.”

I didn't have enough breath to laugh.

Keeping the 400-foot long string straight was no end of fun, as it tangled on every single grass and weed stem in its path, and, when it couldn't find anything else to grab, just tied itself into complex knots.

The sequence went like this: We would pick up a 10-foot pipe section, look through it to make sure it was relatively clean, then stuff a long piece of thin plastic pipe, tied to the string, through it, with a rag wadded on the end to clean out dust and cobwebs. We were also making sure that the bell end of the new pipe was facing the narrow end of the other pipe. Then we would hold the new pipe next to the already-glued segment of pipe, and hold onto the string, and DH would paint both near ends purple, then paint them with glue, then I would run to the end of the new pipe to pull the string tight while we both jammed the bell end onto the narrow end and pushed and twisted until they were tightly connected, and held them a few seconds until the glue set, which it did really fast, so there wasn't a lot of time for dilly-dallying. Ten-foot lengths of plastic pipe – er, conduit – get heavy after awhile, and some of this was done from very un-ergonomic positions, owing to the mounds of dirt piled around the trench. My arms got sore and some of DH ended up a little purple.

But the conduit has now been inspected and approved by the power company, so, progress! However, we cannot have power until we have put the water lines into the trench and covered them up so that all the ground is level again. Then the power company will fasten the high-voltage actual power lines to the pull string, pull it through the conduit and install a transformer on the gravel pad by the house.

Getting the water lines in will entail “welding” about 300 feet feet of polypropylene pipe together in 20-foot sections and dropping placing them carefully in the trench, running from the well to the house. You can't, of course, actually weld plastic pipe; instead, you take some special, expensive tool that gets ridiculously hot and melt the ends of the pipe sections and then jam them together so they stick and become one.

Preferably without welding oneself. I dislike these projects that require dangerous cutting or heating implements, but I guess that's why DH is the one who got certified to do the welding.

But first, he's re-digging out the parts of the trench that we accidentally back-filled too much, to get it back down to the correct two-foot depth.

Stay tuned for further adventures ...